Setting up Flood Agent with Digital Ocean

This guide shows how to setup Flood Agent to use a native JMeter installation on Digital Ocean.

Requirements

Digital Ocean account access

Apache JMeter 5.1.1

Java 1.8

Planning and Configuring the Droplet

Digital Ocean comes with a large range of Droplet sizes available. Choosing the right one to service the amount of concurrency you wish to generate takes a little planning and some 'trial and error'.

Typically load generators (using tools such as JMeter) are primarily memory-bound, followed closely by CPU. It also highly depends on what your virtual users are doing within your script so having ample amounts of both will definitely help accomodate user concurrency in your load test.

For the purposes of this guide - we'll only be looking at a fairly mid-spec'd Droplet however the installation steps no matter what Droplet size you choose will be practically identical.

Choosing a Linux distribution

Digital Ocean support a bunch of Linux distributions - we'll go ahead and choose Ubuntu 18.04 for general ease of use in this guide.

Choosing the droplet size

As previously mentioned we'll choose one of the new Memory-Optimized Droplets being offered.

Choosing the datacenter region

It is fairly important to choose the region based on where your users will realistically be originating from for your production environment. Having a load generator node in a different region will impact latency when it's time to run your test which will most likely translate to higher-than-expected user response times.

For this guide we'll choose the New York datacenter.

We'll also go ahead and select the Monitoring additional option so we can keep an eye on the resource utilization when we are running a load test with this Droplet.

Setting up authentication

In this configuration section, we'll go ahead and choose to use the One-time password (strictly for the purposes of this guide).

It is highly recommended to use SSH keys as it is a more secure method for accessing your Droplet.

Creating your new droplet

Once you are happy with the aforementioned options - go ahead and Create the Droplet and wait until it is available.

First steps to setting up the Flood Agent

Once you have been able to access your new Droplet - it's important to do some initial housekeeping tasks before we get underway in installing the Flood Agent.

Makes sure your droplet has the latest apt-get install packages. Type the following to do this: